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It had been 61 hours since I last thought about it, which by any account, was a miracle. I sat in the post-busy-weekend silence reading the Percy Jackson series and baking pumpkin muffins. As I read, the sun hovered through bare tree branches outside of the kitchen window and the faucet dripdripdripped— a muffled metronome to pace the turning pages.

I had spent the weekend so far as I often did: hanging out with teenagers (thus the realization to catch up on Percy Jackson.) The 61 hours had expired during a sleepover & late night conversation the night before with the high school girls from my basketball team.

“So, Morgan. It’s your turn! Tell us about your love life.” As a teenager, you think adults should have love figured out, that there’s some magic switch that flips when teen drama morphs into stable, romantic adult relationships. But I sat there on the bed, having girl talk with my team, and our failure together popped into my head.

It had been 61 hours since I had thought about you. The lack of you. The absence of you. Sixty-one waking and sleeping hours without thinking of how I missed you, of how perhaps I had made a mistake those many years ago, of how lonely it was to think of you— the absence of you— and wonder.

… Would we have made it?

I’m not so sure that we would have. We were two impossible people who crossed paths by something like coincidence, or providence, and attempted something equally as impossible as ourselves: being together. It probably would have ended badly; I would have hurt you with my fear of commitment and you would have frustrated me by being nice about it. Sixty-one hours since your face faded in and out of my thoughts… Sixty-one hours since I wondered if my face ever faded in and out of yours.